The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

From the Booker prize-winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Format:

Buy the book from:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive Waterstones WHSmith

'Striking...brilliantly done' The Times

An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best.

Anna's aged mother is dying - if her three children would just allow it. Forced by their pity to stay alive, she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.

When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope, love and orange-bellied parrots.

'One of our greatest living novelists' Washington Post

Pyrotechnic brilliance
Daily Mail

Flanagan has delivered a book that both distills the literary qualities for which he has been celebrated for more than a quarter of a century and recasts our ideas about the kind of writer he is and what he can do. This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical... What an astonishing book this is
Michael Williams, Sydney Morning Herald

About Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as ‘one of our greatest living novelists’ and as ‘among the most versatile writers in the English language’ by the New York Review of Books. He won the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish and the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Question 7 was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger and the Prix du meilleur livre étranger as a novel, and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is the first and only author ever to have won both the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes.

A major television series of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is forthcoming, directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds.

Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 13/01/2022
ISBN: 9781529114058
Length: 304 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 130mm
Weight: 217g
Price: £9.99

All editions

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

From the Booker prize-winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Format:

Buy the book from:

Pyrotechnic brilliance

Ambitious, powerful... There is much to enjoy and admire in this novel... Flanagan writes with a startling brilliance

A fiercely well-observed account of the psychological twists and turns, the stress points and the double-binds, of familial love

Richard Flanagan is one of the greatest writers at work in the world today - I admire him and his writing immensely. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a haunting, urgent and important book about our broken and confusing age

Striking... brilliantly done... Flanagan is wise enough to place his wider concerns, and the accompanying magic realism within the sturdy framework of a conventional family narrative

Magnificent... Flanagan hasn't just written about the space between living and dying; in writing about the things that are disappearing from the world he's captured something fundamental about the moment we're living in

Pure and simple... A book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects... What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan's novel doesn't end in condemnation. It keeps searching for the proper form for love

An extraordinary tour de force, utterly compelling... It's a heartfelt, urgent plea to restore our connection to the world before it's too late

Utterly dazzling

About Richard Flanagan

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter